Pico's Crush

by Carol Van Natta

  “I will show you in the game,” said Mairwen. She rose to her feet and led the children to the front door.

  “What’s this game called?” asked Lyssi, who liked naming things.

  Mairwen gave them all a tight, feral smile. “The Hunter and the Fox.”

  Four minutes before six, the childcare center’s door chimed and the wallcomp blinked for attention. Mairwen cocked a questioning eye toward Miguel, who had frozen in the act of stacking a chair. Because it was so close to the end of the day, she’d convinced the children to help restore order to some of the chaos in the childcare suite. Lyssi had become enamored of the cargo loops on Mairwen’s pants. Celia and Davalia were sorting through the dishes in one of the playhouses, by means of pretending to be serving each other what she assumed were invented food items, because the girls were nearly incapacitated with giggling.

  “Someone without a code wants in,” Miguel said, his expression losing animation. “That’s what the man did.”

  “Yes,” she said. It would have been the only way to get to Valenia. How and when he’d targeted her were unanswered questions.

  She keyed the wallcomp to show who was at the door, and was unsurprised to see the faces of Luka and Sojaire, who had pinged her ten minutes ago that they’d landed. The traffic system glitches she’d experienced must have cleared up for them to be able to arrive just before the center’s closing time.

  “They’re the partners I told you about,” she told the children, making sure Miguel saw she was pleased to see them. As far as she knew, no conventional minder could read or affect her, so she wanted to reassure the boy that they were safe.

  She entered her temporary access code, then stepped back when the door irised open. The children all looked up to watch the men enter. Luka turned straight to her, a smile playing on his handsome face. Sojaire moved to the side, and the door irised shut again.

  “Pleasant afternoon?” he asked. A hint of concern laced his tone.

  “Yes.” She kept her face straight and serious. “I only used the ropes once.”

  Lyssi, who had deliberately gotten her hand stuck in the cargo loop on Mairwen’s left pant leg, shook her head vigorously, making her red curls bounce wildly. “No, twice.” She looked up at Luka earnestly. “Once with me and once with Isiro. He cried.”

  Luka tried to cover his alarm, until he realized he was being teased. “Oh, the usual, then.” He grinned. Mairwen twitched a smile in response. It was rare when her teasing left him nonplussed.

  She helped Lyssi extract her hand, then introduced her and the other children to both Luka and Sojaire. She then enlisted the men into doing as the children directed them for moving the heavier play houses to a more even spacing.

  As soon as she got the chance, she spoke quietly to Sojaire. “Miguel needs help. He was here when Valenia was taken. I think he’s an empath.” Sojaire would know what to do. Unlike her, he was a natural at nurturing, when he wasn’t distracted or second-guessing himself.

  Davalia’s older sister arrived almost exactly at six, as expected. The little girl waved goodbye as her sister led her out the door.

  To give Sojaire time with Miguel, Mairwen asked Lyssi and Celia to show Luka the real kitchen, not the one in their make-believe spaceship, to see if it was ready to be left for the night. She used her percomp to review the list of instructions Pico had pinged her after taking off in the flitter. Mairwen was reluctant to move away from a clear view of the suite’s only outside entrance, so she sent Luka and the girls to the nap room, freshers, and tiny office to check that they, too, were squared away for the evening.

  She was about to resort to asking the children to teach Luka the story game when the front door irised open to reveal Miguel and Celia’s parents, two smiling Hispanic men. The little girl ran to her taller father, who smiled and scooped her up into his arms for wet, smacking kisses, to the girl’s giggling delight. Miguel said goodbye to Sojaire, then made a point to catch Mairwen’s eye. “Seremos zorros.” He retrieved his shoulder bag and Celia’s sweater from a hook by the door, and the family left.

  Lyssi tugged on Mairwen’s pant leg. “Will you carry me?” She held up her arms.

  The request made no sense. The room was only twenty-five meters at its longest, and the girl had traversed it countless times. “To where?”

  Lyssi pointed to the hooks by the door, only a couple of meters away, then held up her hands expectantly.

  Mairwen looked to Luka for help. The exasperating man laughed and nodded. “I’ll explain later.”

  Mairwen lifted Lyssi up and felt arms and legs wrap around her neck and waist. Lyssi smelled of dust, the lingering scent of her favorite coconut cookies, and the unique scent that was Lyssi. Mairwen carried her the seven steps to the hooks, then let her down. Lyssi lifted her small, translucent backpack from its hook and slid her arms into its padded web. “Mum said she’d be on time tonight.” She sat on a stool under the now empty hooks and looked expectantly at the door.

  The phrase “on time,” Mairwen had quickly learned once she’d established a life in the real world, was a relative term. To her and her fellow death trackers, it meant seconds, or if she was in full tracker mode, milliseconds. To the rest of the galaxy, it could mean anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more, depending on the speaker and circumstances. To Lyssi’s mother, it apparently meant twenty minutes after closing time.

  The woman swept into the door, barely waiting for the iris to open before stepping in and standing on the threshold so it couldn’t close again. She looked at Mairwen, Luka, and Sojaire, then smiled in evident satisfaction. “I see the manager acted on my recommendation.” She held out her hand to her daughter. Lyssi obediently moved to her mother’s side and slipped her hand into her mother’s.

  Mairwen ignored it as a non-sequitur comment. That seemed to irritate the woman, but after one supercilious sniff, she turned and marched out smartly, forcing Lyssi to half run to keep up.

  The door irised closed, and Mairwen relaxed for the first time in ninety-seven minutes.

  Luka tilted his head toward the door. “Peculiar woman.”

  “Hmph,” said Sojaire, crossing his arms. “She thinks she got Pico’s contract termed, and that we’re the new staff.”

  Luka gave Mairwen an evil smile. “Want to volunteer again? We could…”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  Luka laughed, undoubtedly feeling he’d avenged himself for her earlier teasing. “Anything else we need to do here?”

  She reviewed the checklist from Pico one more time. “No.”

  She entered her temporary access code to open the door. Once they were in the hall, she waited until the iris closed and the light over the door’s threshold went dark before turning to leave. She was grateful to be able to hear the sounds of the building, and to smell more than just the childcare suite, which had only the one door to offer new scents.

  The hallway was easily wide enough to walk three abreast, with Luka to her right and Sojaire to her left. It was brightly lit, as was the atrium. It was a stark contrast to the evening shadows once they left the building and headed toward the Materials Science building and the flitter stacker.

  Murmurs of watery waves provided a subtle accompaniment to everything else she could hear. She tried not to imagine how vast the dark, deep water was beyond their artificial island, but she caught herself edging toward Luka as they walked.

  Sojaire was focused on his wristcomp. “Luka, you still haven’t answered that encrypted ping from Ms. Zheer.”

  When she looked to Luka for an explanation, he frowned. “She asked me to meet a man named Lièrén Sòng, listen to what he has to say, and ‘evaluate’ him. Her word.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, here in Tremplin. He’s the CPS diplomatic liaison assigned to a frontier planet called Abasarran.” He shook his head. “Setting aside for a moment the question of how she knew we’d be on Nila Marbela, or why he’s so far from home, it’s not like her to wan
t anything to do with the CPS.”

  Mairwen tamped down an instinctive frisson of fear. “The External Relations Division is where the CPS sends misfits.”

  “Or embarrassments,” he agreed. “Sojaire’s research on him turned up a scandal on a covert operations group out of Concordance Prime from a couple of years ago. It was a top newstrend until he vanished.”

  “He’s from the wealthy Sòng family,” said Sojaire. “The CPS probably didn’t want to tangle with them.”

  With her, the CPS had done exactly what it wanted, when it wanted, but perhaps her unknown family hadn’t had the same clout. She was glad the decision on whether or not to meet Sòng was Luka’s. Her judgment was irreparably compromised when it came to his safety and her freedom. “If you’re going, do you want me there?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Hell, I don’t want to be there, either, but I will. I trust Zheer. I owe her.” He slid his fingers through his hair. “Sojaire is having a hard time finding a secure, easy access, anonymous meeting space with multiple exits.”

  They were all hampered by their unfamiliarity with the city. She only knew one location that fit the bill. “What about the construction area in the Math building?”

  “What? Oh, you mean for the meeting.” He slowed to look over his shoulder at the building behind them. “Thanks to Majeed, it’s still sealed, and I still have access.” His head tilted a little. “It’s a bit macabre, but it has no cameras yet. The killer has already vetted it, and we know he’s security-minded. It’ll do.” He faced forward again and brushed her hand with his. “Have I told you lately how much I value your unconventional ideas?”

  She brushed her fingers against his. “Yes.” He smiled, and she returned it.

  “On an entirely different subject,” said Luka, “Jerzi thinks the attack on them this afternoon was targeted at Andra De Luna. Could be her questions about the lab sabotage disturbed a sleeping wolverine or two.”

  “I don’t know the politics, but the security setup is unusual.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  “The university relies heavily on security for show for the floater—visible security systems, security programming in the building AI, automated access control points—but it’s thin and brittle, and remotely monitored. The Chemistry building has new, more robust systems and security staff who pretend to be students or low-paid workers. The manager pretends ignorance.”

  Luka was amused. “You’re going to say ‘pretends’ in your report?”

  She crooked a smile at him. “I’ll provide examples. They can choose their own word.”

  The stacker was close to the shore, where the waves crashed more loudly. She needed to distract herself. “Why did Lyssi want to be carried?”

  “She just wanted a hug, ástin mín.” Luka slipped his hand into hers. The warmth of his hand and the familiar scent of him soothed her.

  Why would a child seek physical affection from a stranger? Had she been alone with Luka, she might have asked him, but Sojaire knew little about her unusual background, and she preferred to keep it that way because she liked him. He knew about her extraordinary senses, and that her physiology was different, but she’d never told him how or why. The less he knew, the better chance he had of being left alone, if the ultra-secret CPS “paracommando pathfinder” program ever discovered she had lived through the fiery death it had taken her years to plan and stage.

  Luka, her wonderfully brilliant partner and caring lover of four years, knew more, but even he was ignorant of all she’d done for the CPS. Strictly speaking, she was no longer entirely human. She’d been one of the handful of “students” who survived highly illegal alteration of her DNA, erasure of all childhood memories, and the CPS’s sadistic but brutally effective training program. She knew many ways to kill people without mercy, but had to work out by trial and error how to do normal things. She was lucky Luka was so patient with her.

  He squeezed her fingers briefly. “I’ve never seen the Brigadier side of you, ordering those kids around. How did you make them behave—show them your knives?”

  “I considered it,” she said. Luka snorted in amusement, evidently believing she was joking. “I asked them to teach me to play their games.”

  “Why did Miguel say ‘we will be foxes’?” asked Sojaire.

  “I taught them a game. Were you able to talk to him?”

  “Yeah,” said Sojaire. “You were right about his talent. He said Val hid how terrified she was from the other kids, until the man got impatient and made her close the center and leave. He said the man was ‘a black hole,’ which is what strong shielders feel like to empaths. It’s corroboration of what Val said.”

  She heard Luka’s breath catch, and his hand in hers stiffened. He said nothing until they were in their rented flitter, their seats crowded together in the cramped passenger section. Sojaire was at the controls, waiting for the traffic system’s countdown. Out of self-preservation, she and Sojaire took turns flying or driving, because while Luka knew how, he lost patience quickly and tended to ignore traffic rules. If he was distracted by a case, he was a menace.

  Luka broke the silence. “Unless the case breaks tonight, I’m ready to leave Nila Marbela after the meeting with Sòng. The pattern is usually a clusters of kills, then moving on.” She guessed that another lead pointing to the Citizen Protection Service, however obliquely, had made him unhappy. Strong shielders were rare outside the judicial system and the CPS.

  Sojaire’s shoulders tightened, but he kept his focus forward. “The locals say no one matching his description has gone through any spaceport or the space station. Shouldn’t we try to catch him before he can hurt another girl like Valenia?” Sojaire didn’t often try to tell Luka what to do, so Mairwen guessed he was upset because the victim had been a friend. Mairwen sympathized.

  Luka frowned and looked away from her toward the city lights as the flitter locked into the traffic system and ascended. She knew him well enough to know he was irritated with planetary politics and the slow pace of the case, and was worried about her being noticed by the CPS. At the same time, he was driven by his strong sense of justice, especially since the latest victim wasn’t an anonymous stranger.

  He already knew her opinion, so she left him to his thoughts. She considered the security assessment report she’d be sending the university that evening, and wondered if there was some way to phrase her recommendations so they’d do something meaningful, instead of adding a few sensors here and there and calling it done. She’d performed hundreds of assessments for organizations large and small, and she could count on one hand the number that had acted on all her recommendations.

  “I’ll give it a couple more days,” said Luka finally. “He didn’t kill Valenia when he could have, and that’s new. He might make a mistake because of it.”

  Sojaire’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “Thank you.” He blew out the breath he’d been holding and looked back at Luka. “Pico blames herself for not protecting Val. She’ll feel better if the mistake you discovered gets the warped bastard caught.”

  Underneath his good humor and compassion, Sojaire was usually in firm control of his emotions. His rare use of a swear word suggested he was having a hard time with that at the moment. Perhaps he could talk to Luka later about what was bothering him. She wished she was better about being a friend, but she had so little experience.

  She thought she might enjoy being friends with Andra De Luna, who also found humor in small things, and Mairwen liked brilliant minds. Too bad their lives were on distant planets.

  Maybe it was her constant uneasiness about deep water, or just a wish for different star lanes than the ones on her chart, but a longing for comfort welled, and suddenly, she understood a little girl’s request to be carried when she could easily have walked.

  Too bad she was an adult woman with adult responsibilities. For all that she’d dreamed of it and sacrificed to win it, life in the real world was sometimes full of frustration.

  Cha
pter 16

  * Planet: Nila Marbela * GDAT 3241.148 *

  Jerzi stood with his fists on his hips in the middle of Andra’s high-rise apartment. It was small, but open and airy, with gentle blue seashell curves to its architecture. One wall was privacy windows that probably had a nice view of the city. “I’m fine.”

  Andra’s eyes narrowed. “Says el burro terco with six wound packs, a temporary bone regenerator on his thigh, and a subcutaneous flush port for his formerly broken ribs.” She pulled out a chair at her kitchen table and patted it. “Sit.”

  The medical center had wanted him to spend the night there, and he’d wanted to spend it anywhere but. He had no idea how she’d bullied him into going to her apartment.

  “Don’t make me use my shockstick, Commander Crush.” He had a hazy memory of her threatening to flatline him and carry him out in one of the center’s antigrav chairs. “They only let you go because I said someone would be with you.” She glared and pointed. “Sit!”

  Jerzi held firm a moment more, then sighed and gave in. He limped to the chair, then hid a wince as he angled his hips so as not to jostle the leg with the regen unit. The movement made his sore ribs ache. He missed the excellent minder healers they’d had in the military. “You’re the only one who calls me stubborn.”

  “R-i-i-ight,” she said, drawing out the vowel. She pulled a cold beer from her cold box, then opened a cabinet and rooted around for a mug. She set both in front of him. “Hungry yet?”

  He made a noncommittal sound, even though his stomach felt hollow. Accelerated healing treatments and regeneration units made most people ravenous, once the pain patches wore off. For reasons he didn’t care to examine too closely, he was reluctant to owe her any more favors than he already did. “Go shower.”

  Her messy hair, wound-sealed ear, blood-stained top, and dirt-streaked shorts reminded him of wilder days from when they were both young and immortal. And fluxed red hot with hormones, but he definitely wasn’t going there.

  She started toeing open the clasps on her shoes. “Not saying you’re a liar, my friend, but your stomach’s been growling loud enough to scare the whales at sea.” She kicked her shoes onto the mat near her front door. Her bright floral gun bag slumped nearby. “But I’m tired of smelling like blood and wound seal, so I’m taking advantage of your stubbornness.” She patted his shoulder once as she passed by. “Anything in the cold box is fair game. Don’t pass out while I’m gone.”